I am an avid reader myself, but it is hard to find free time. I mostly read technical books these days, currently Cocoa Programmers for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass, excellent book. Other days when I do have a spear 5 mins I usually go the www.slapastory.com (sorry for the plug). Its one of my little startups.

This is an interesting site, and I think may benefit my startup users. My site slapastory.com is a social site focusing on writers, I would love to cross link with you? Let me know.

Definitely will be in the next release.

Wow, this is fantastic, we are working on some of the ideas you mention, the others we will need to add to our list.

Thanks heaps and keep them coming.

that is somethng to think about. Not sure how writers will react to 140 words thought. Also do mean characters, right?

140 characters is probably approaching some lower bound of what is required for an interesting story. 140 characters, while conforming to the length of a text SMS, would probably be too brief...

Firstly, thank you for your honest feedback. Writing sites do need self respect, and this is the reason that we have developed this site. I am personally a developer and an avid reader. Although it may seems like a ripping of Digg - digg doesn't have a fiction category or any sub-categories that we have included. In terms of layout we didn't want to get too creative, but we do want to make it as simple on the eyes as possible - so our priority at the moment is to style the stories.

Again thank you for your feedback.

Absolutely. Well, I'm working on a site for writers at the moment, and it focuses on a completely radical angle. When it's done I'll tell you, and I'm hoping you tell me if it's got flaws as well. We writers ought to stick together. :-)

definitely, let me know and I will put your link on my site.

Thanks, search is coming... but you can filter by user by clicking on the username in the user "cloud"

You are right, at the moment we are trying to build a mini community of writers. Mostly this was a request from a few friends of mine that are avid writers. We just want to see how far this can go. Any exposure for them is good. Maybe we can even get publishers on board.

You never know until you try it.

I've done NaNoWriMo once, and plan to do it again this year, I think. And a big part of that experience is the "shared misery", or "in the trenches together", vibe that the whole project engenders. November is coming up fast...you might consider sending a note to the fine folks who run that project, asking how you could make your site work well for NaNoWriMo participants. The worst they can say is "no" (or maybe the worst they could do is re-implement your idea themselves...they do seem to be hackers themselves, but that's an unlikely scenario).

It could give you a huge influx of users for the month of November...and some of them would stick around. I no longer write much fiction outside of that month (I do so much technical writing for my startup that I don't seem to have the drive for it outside of work), but I know a lot of the participants are frequent writers.

Getting publishers involved somehow would also be a good direction. Many print-only publishers are trying to figure out how to deal with this new-fangled (less than twenty years old...clearly unproven!) web thing...perhaps you can help them. I don't immediately see the connection, but perhaps user-created and user-edited books are the wave of the future. Somehow applying the reddit/digg model to fiction seems at least an amusing thought exercise.

Thanks for the advice, I will be in touch with NaNoWriMo people see what they say.

Thanks Again

Thanks again.

Thanks for that... you are too excited... any feedback that we can actually use?